Toward an understanding of anticipatory pleasure deficits in schizophrenia: Memory, prospection, and emotion experience

Anticipatory pleasure deficits have been observed in people with schizophrenia. Less is known about the extent to which interrelated processes that comprise anticipatory pleasure, including memory, prospection, and emotion experience are disrupted. We asked people with (n = 32) and without (n = 29) schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder to provide memory and prospection narratives in response to specific cues. Half of the prospections followed a memory task, and half followed a control task. People with schizophrenia generated memories similar in content and experience as controls even as they described them less clearly. However, people with schizophrenia were less likely to explicitly reference the past in their prospections, and their prospections were less detailed and richly experienced than controls, regardless of the task completed before prospection. People with schizophrenia reported similar levels of positive emotion (current and predicted) in positive prospections that followed the memory task, but less positive emotion than controls in positive prospections that followed the control task. Taken together, these results suggest that people with schizophrenia experience difficulties drawing from past experiences and generating detailed prospections. However, asking people with schizophrenia to recall and describe memories prior to prospection may increase the likelihood of drawing from the past in prospections, and may help boost current and predicted pleasure.